Back Link Diversification: Your Homepage Needs a Break

As a Digital Marketer, I often find sites that have a robust back link profile and diversified anchor text – showing they understand the mechanics and need for outreach in a solid SEO strategy. Then after you start to take a closer look at where the links all point, you uncover the reason for a high bounce rate or the reason they have a horrible conversion rate because everything points to the homepage! If you only ever needed ONE page to drive your business, why waste the money on all those other pages being developed? It seems most businesses forgot that the reason you have the other pages is to clarify various topics of your site and drive the decision process to conversion. Don’t let those pages go to waste, institute some back link diversification to drive your visitors to the best page for their visit!

The crux of the point comes down to all of your traffic leading to the only page that most people recognize – your homepage, which is the easiest to point the link. The better management of your back links would involve regular review of your back link profile to uncover the best pages to point back links towards. Then maintain an outreach to ask the other site owners to adjust possible anchor text and re-point those links to the deeper pages on the site that would give their audience a better user experience (UX).

It seems very basic, but the practice usually intimidates site owners who are happy to just get the links and do not want to risk having them removed. The key element here is the genuine interest in improving the user experience. As a site owner, it should build more trust that I have made the right decision to link to your site when you reach out to me and ask me to give my readers a more direct link to satisfy their interest than to just leave an incorrectly pointed link simply to maintain the links between our sites.

I have pasted the easiest phrasing I have found to accomplish this, so please feel free to use or personalize it as you see fit. The most important thing is to use it:

Hello (Insert Site Owner’s Name),

I want to start off by thanking you for sharing my content with your audience and linking to my site. I take a great deal of responsibility in maintaining a positive user experience whenever someone visits my site, and especially if they were referred from a site like yours. In keeping this responsibility, I noticed that you linked to my homepage in your article, but I believe the better page for the content you were sharing would be (insert URL for the new target page) because (explain why you think it would be a better fit). If you agree, please use the above URL to update your link and provide your visitor with the information they need faster. If not, please give me your feedback and maybe we could find a better page together to direct them towards.

I look forward to your response.

Respectfully,

(Your contact information)

So from a marketing perspective, please remember the back link profile needs to remain primarily about UX (even when that user is another site’s audience). The secondary concerns regarding follow/nofollow, Domain/Page Authority, and all of the other elements of link SEO should always defer to the UX and direct the landing page for any links to the most relevant and useful page for that link. This concept should also drive your content strategy to ensure you are not oversaturating any individual page with too many keywords (ahem…like your homepage). Try to stick to 3-5 keywords per page including variants , and develop additional pages when that ratio seems to be getting beyond those parameters.

Jason comes with almost 10 years of experience in digital marketing and a background in many different industries with a specialization in higher education. He has relocated from Florida to the Westborough area to join the Wakefly family. He has brought with him the holistic and collaborative approach that is ingrained into the Wakefly marketing philosophy.